Death, Thou Shalt Die
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are
great.
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from
our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
What a thing it is to stand at the foot of a grave and
declare victory.
To lower into the earth the remains of what was, for a moment,
human: a loved one, a relative, a parent or, God forbid, a child. And there to
say that this meant something, this little life, this spark amidst the
darkness, who once laughed and wept and learned and loved; whose mind contained
vast worlds unknown, a universe of thoughts and hopes and dreams and fears. And
is now but ashes and bones and dust.
A heartbeat. A hair’s breadth. And it’s all over. Or so it
would seem.
I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve buried, how many I’ve
watched die. But never once has it led me to despair. To mourn, certainly. To grieve,
for years. But I’ve never believed, no matter how I might try, that death is simply
the end. Maybe it’s because I grew up around death. My grandparents’ property
abutted a lovely, massive old cemetery, the sort you find in Pennsylvania
that goes back to the 1700s, the 1600s. That’s a long time for Americans.
And that place was never scary to me. It was a place of peace,
a place of rest, a place of enlightenment. That field, I felt, with its
weathered headstones, was a world between worlds, a time between times. A passageway,
if you will, from the here and now to the great unknown beyond. There lay all
my forebears whose questions now are answered. Someday I too would lay with
them. Someday I too would know what they know, the dead know. I could never
quite bring myself to believe that those who die are simply gone. I still can’t
to this day. It’s just not in me.
And in this conviction, at least, I stand in good company. Every
human society, every philosophy, every religion, has known that there are
worlds beyond this one, destinies that await each of us beyond our pilgrimage
on earth. We have always believed in spirits and souls, gods and monsters,
afterlives and just rewards. Science hasn’t changed that, hasn’t changed who we
are. We all know there’s more to life than merely what we can measure, touch,
and see. We all know that there’s so much more to explore than this one broken,
fallen world.
Which is why the Hallowmas is so important, the celebration of
All the Saints. Today we remember all those who have gone before us, all those
who died in Christ to rise immortal in His likeness. The dead are not defeated.
They are not even truly dead.
For them this life, this world, was but an embryo, a
half-formed existence, wracked by pangs of labor, which have given way now to
new birth. And the reality they now know, the goodness and truth and beauty they
experience directly, unfettered by mortal flesh, is so far beyond our
comprehension and communication that it would be like lecturing a child in the
womb on high-level theoretical physics.
At the heart of all human experience lies the conviction
that the world, as it is, is not as it ought to be; that everything we think or
say or do is wrong somehow, just a little off the mark; and that the realest
things in our world—love, beauty, truth, morality—are but the shadows of a
greater reality we cannot quite manage to see. We can only glimpse it in
poetry, in art, in myths and dreams, in selfless acts of kindness and in the
sheer magnitude of wonders found within the natural world around us, if only we
can manage to sit still long enough to pay attention. But beyond these
glimpses, flashes of truth in a shattered mirror, it’s all wrong somehow, all
fallen.
And even time itself has been affected, so that we do not
experience time as we ought, as it was meant to be, but rather as the grinding
away of relentless aeons, tick by tick, grain by grain, measuring our time by metronomes
and teaspoons. Little wonder, then, that death seems so unnatural, for time
itself is out of joint, winding down inexorably into entropy and chaos, making
a mockery of meaning and purpose and value. And all this mess—is exactly why
Christ had to come.
Sin is separation from God, and our world indeed was
separate, sabotaged from the beginning by powers far beyond our mortal ken. And
so God Himself—the Creator, the Source and Font of All Being—entered into His
Creation as one of us, one of the lost and wayward children of Adam and of Eve.
He comes to our world as Victor and King, the realest thing in this and all
other realities, though we perceive Him rather as marginal, poor, unimportant.
And everywhere Christ goes, He makes things real: He heals the sick and feeds
the hungry, rebukes the sinner, casts out the demon, instructs the ignorant,
consoles the grieving, forgives the unforgiveable, and brings the dead to life.
And then He does the darnedest thing of all: He dies. He
takes the Cross, the lash, the nails, the spear. He takes all the grisliest horrors
our broken brains can devise and He takes them all upon Himself. He enters into
our brokenness, enters into our wounds. Enters into that bottomless chasm torn
through Creation by sin, and fills it up to bursting with the life and breath
and blood of God—and thereby changes everything we thought we knew, of death,
and time, and love.
If All Saints had a slogan, a catch phrase or a theme, it
could be none other than Christus Victor:
Christ the Victor, Christ Victorious! For He has come into our world to grapple
with our death. Not to ignore it or step around it but to embrace it, to conquer
it, to overcome by going through. And so now death has been defeated! He has
broken the back of the grave, so that we may now face death—not as a terror,
not as a master, not as some monster which must be appeased—but rather as a
servant, a slave, a prisoner of war.
Our Lord has conquered death and hell! So when we die at last
in Him, we rise in Him as well.
We tend to think of reality as that which we can see and
touch, while we view things spiritual as wispy, ephemeral, puffs of mere smoke
drifting amidst the solid things of life. But the Bible insists that we have it
all upside-down. It’s this world as we know it which is ephemeral and passing,
a vapor upon the breeze; while spiritual realities are those which stand
adamant, immune to death, decay, and time, immortal in the heavens. The Spirit
is life. The Spirit does not die.
When Christ breathes into us His Spirit, He makes us real,
makes us solid, makes us Him. Thus does the perishable put on the imperishable,
the mortal put on immortality. Thus fortified—resurrected!—we may ascend the
hill of the Lord to stand in His holy place. We may shine forth like sparks
through the stubble, to rule over nations and peoples. And we as God’s saints
are but the firstfruits of His harvest!
For Christ did not come to save some people, to save one
little corner of this fallen, wayward world, but to save everyone: all peoples,
all places, all times, and all of Creation! This suffering now is but the
birth-pangs until the harvest comes in full. For the first heaven and the first
earth are even now passing away, and the sea of chaos at length shall be no
more. Both shall be reborn as a new heaven and a new earth—one and the same
this time—in which God shall no longer be separated from His children but
instead shall dwell amongst them in the City beyond all time.
And God Himself will
be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed
away. And the one who was seated on the throne said, “Behold! I make all things
new! … It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To
the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those
who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be
my children.”
Death is not your end, dear Christian. It is only the beginning.
Remember this, when the world seems naught but frustration,
pain and despair. Remember this, when the weight of life proves more than we
think we can bear. The things that plague us, in and out, shall one day pass
away. And you will rise from out of death to your first new endless day.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy
Spirit. Amen.
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